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Full-Text Articles in History

The Language Of Law: Interpreting Nineteenth-Century Legal Documents, Arthur Mitchell Fraas Mar 2015

The Language Of Law: Interpreting Nineteenth-Century Legal Documents, Arthur Mitchell Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

The documentary record produced in the course of 19th century American legal proceedings remains one of the greatest sources for understanding the everyday lives of the middling and non-elite who otherwise rarely rise to the surface of the historical record. This documentation though has often gone unused or misused thanks to the circumstances of its production and the difficulties of parsing the specialized language used within. Documents produced for use in a courtroom always have multiple layers of meaning, each intended with different purposes and audiences in mind. Formulaic language and confusing tangles of proceedings and filings too often get …


America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai Mar 2014

America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai

Robert L Tsai

The U.S. Constitution opens by proclaiming the sovereignty of all citizens: "We the People." Robert Tsai's gripping history of alternative constitutions invites readers into the circle of those who have rejected this ringing assertion--the defiant groups that refused to accept the Constitution's definition of who "the people" are and how their authority should be exercised. America's Forgotten Constitutions is the story of America as told by dissenters: squatters, Native Americans, abolitionists, socialists, internationalists, and racial nationalists. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Tsai chronicles eight episodes in which discontented citizens took the extraordinary step of drafting a new constitution. He examines …


Making Claims: Indian Litigants And The Expansion Of The English Legal World In The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Fraas Dec 2013

Making Claims: Indian Litigants And The Expansion Of The English Legal World In The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

This paper explores the British Imperial legal world of the mid-eighteenth century. Within this period, the previously confined spaces of English law and legal institutions became open to an ever widening set of legal subjects, both people as well as places. The paper focuses on what was at the time perhaps England’s most remote and murkily defined legal space, the East India Company (EIC) settlements at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. The paper shows how a series of legal actors: metropolitan judges, Indian litigants and elite lawyers, first bridged the legal worlds of England and the subcontinent. I argue that by …


A New Introduction To American Constitutionalism, Mark Graber Oct 2013

A New Introduction To American Constitutionalism, Mark Graber

Mark Graber

A New Introduction to American Constitutionalism is the first text to study the entirety of American constitutionalism, not just the traces that appear in Supreme Court decisions. Mark A. Graber both explores and offers original answers to such central questions as: What is a Constitution? What are fundamental constitutional purposes? How are constitutions interpreted? How is constitutional authority allocated? How do constitutions change? How is the Constitution of the United States influenced by international and comparative law? and, most important, How does the Constitution work? Relying on an historical/institutional perspective, the book illustrates how American constitutionalism is a distinct form …


"They Have Travailed Into A Wrong Latitude:" The Laws Of England, Indian Settlements, And The British Imperial Constitution 1726-1773, Arthur Fraas Mar 2012

"They Have Travailed Into A Wrong Latitude:" The Laws Of England, Indian Settlements, And The British Imperial Constitution 1726-1773, Arthur Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

In the mid-eighteenth century the British Crown claimed a network of territories around the globe as its "Empire." Through a close study of law and legal instutions in Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, as well as London, this dissertation examines what it meant to be a part of that Empire. These three cities on the Indian subcontinent were administered by the English East India Company and as such have often seemed abberant or unique to scholars of eighteenth-century empire and law. This dissertation argues that these Indian cities fit squarely within an imperial legal and governmental framework common to the wider British …


Book Review, Christian G. Samito (Ed.). Changes In Law And Society During The Civil War And Reconstruction: A Legal History Documentary Reader. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. 352 Pages. $29.50 (Paper), Thomas Reed Mar 2012

Book Review, Christian G. Samito (Ed.). Changes In Law And Society During The Civil War And Reconstruction: A Legal History Documentary Reader. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. 352 Pages. $29.50 (Paper), Thomas Reed

Thomas J Reed

No abstract provided.


From India To The Atlantic World: "Indian Grants" And The Imperial Jurisprudence Of The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Mitchell Fraas Jan 2012

From India To The Atlantic World: "Indian Grants" And The Imperial Jurisprudence Of The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Mitchell Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

No abstract provided.


Primary Sources At A Distance: Researching Indian Colonial Law, Arthur Fraas Dec 2011

Primary Sources At A Distance: Researching Indian Colonial Law, Arthur Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

No abstract provided.


Readers, Scribes, And Collectors: The Dissemination Of Legal Knowledge In Eighteenth-Century British South Asia, Arthur Mitchell Fraas Dec 2011

Readers, Scribes, And Collectors: The Dissemination Of Legal Knowledge In Eighteenth-Century British South Asia, Arthur Mitchell Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

This draft paper - first presented at the Middle Eastern Studies Association annual conference in 2012 - looks at the circulation of legal knowledge in print and manuscript in eighteenth-century British India.


Bad News For John Marshall, David B. Kopel, Gary Lawson Dec 2011

Bad News For John Marshall, David B. Kopel, Gary Lawson

David B Kopel

In Bad News for Professor Koppelman: The Incidental Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate, we demonstrated that the individual mandate’s forced participation in commercial transactions cannot be justified under the Necessary and Proper Clause as the Clause was interpreted in McCulloch v. Maryland. Professor Andrew Koppelman’s response, Bad News for Everybody, wrongly conflates that argument with a wide range of interpretative and substantive positions that are not logically entailed by taking seriously the requirement that laws enacted under the Necessary and Proper Clause must be incidental to an enumerated power. His response is thus largely unresponsive to our actual arguments.


"Not Charity But Justice": Charles Gore, Workers, And The Way, John F. Wirenius Dec 2010

"Not Charity But Justice": Charles Gore, Workers, And The Way, John F. Wirenius

John F. Wirenius

Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford, co-author of "Lux Mundi" and leading liberal Anglo-Catholic of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, was an early exponent of the rights of labor, and advocate for collective bargaining. This Article examines the theological underpinnings of this advocacy, finding it inextricably rooted in Gore's vision of Christianity as "the Way" fundamentally a way of life, and not a series of doctrinal commitments.


Card Check Labor Certification: Lessons From New York, William A. Herbert Dec 2010

Card Check Labor Certification: Lessons From New York, William A. Herbert

William A. Herbert

During the debate over the card check proposal in the Employee Free Choice Act of 2009 (EFCA), there has been a notable lack of discussion about New York’s fifty-year history and experience with card check certification. This article challenges and contradicts much of the prior scholarship and debate over EFCA by examining New York’s development and administration of card check procedures. The article begins with an overview of the history of New York public sector labor relations prior to the establishment of collective bargaining rights. As part of that historical overview, it examines the development of informal employee organization representation, …


Gay And Lesbian Elders: History, Law, And Identity Politics In The United States, Nancy J. Knauer Dec 2009

Gay And Lesbian Elders: History, Law, And Identity Politics In The United States, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

The approximately two million gay and lesbian elders in the United States are an underserved and understudied population. At a time when gay men and lesbians enjoy an unprecedented degree of social acceptance and legal protection, many elders face the daily challenges of aging isolated from family, detached from the larger gay and lesbian community, and ignored by mainstream aging initiatives. Drawing on materials from law, history, and social theory, this book integrates practical proposals for reform with larger issues of sexuality and identity. Beginning with a summary of existing demographic data and offering a historical overview of pre-Stonewall views …


The Evolution Of Women's Rights In Inheritance, Kristine Knaplund Dec 2007

The Evolution Of Women's Rights In Inheritance, Kristine Knaplund

Kristine Knaplund

No abstract provided.


The Institutional Dynamics Of Early Modern Eurasian Trade: The Commenda And The Corporation, Ron Harris Dec 2007

The Institutional Dynamics Of Early Modern Eurasian Trade: The Commenda And The Corporation, Ron Harris

Ron Harris

The focus of this article is on legal-economic institutions that organized early-modern Eurasian trade. It identifies two such institutions that had divergent dispersion patterns, the corporation and the commenda. The corporation ended up as a uniquely European institution that did not migrate until the era of European colonization. The commenda that originated in Arabia migrated all the way to Western Europe and to China. The article explains their divergent dispersion based on differences in their institutional and geographical environments and on dynamic factors. It claims that institutional analysis errs when it ignores migration of institutions. It provides building blocks for …


"A Bridge To One America: The Civil Rights Performance Of The Clinton Administration" And "Bill Clinton And Black America", Bill Sleeman Dec 2002

"A Bridge To One America: The Civil Rights Performance Of The Clinton Administration" And "Bill Clinton And Black America", Bill Sleeman

Bill Sleeman

No abstract provided.


Legal Rhetoric And Revolutionary Change, Richard Kay Dec 1996

Legal Rhetoric And Revolutionary Change, Richard Kay

Richard Kay

If we define revolutionary change as the alteration of fundamental political arrangements in ways inconsistent with accepted understandings of law, we would not expect to find the invocation of law in justification of that change. In fact, however, such justification is not uncommon. This paper examines three cases exposing differing attitudes to legal justification of revolution-- the English Revolution of 1688-89, the secession of the Southern states at the beginning of the American Civil War and the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In each case the paper describes the revolutionaries' use of legal language. It then shows how the use or …